Amtrak's Lake Shore: An overland adventure begins

I’m delighted to welcome guest poster Tim Ravelling to Trains on the Brain, with his evocative post about the slightly inauspicious start to a mammoth overland journey, starting with the vagaries of Amtrak’s Lake Shore line, from Chicago to New York. Make sure you follow the rest of his journey at his own blog, Good and Lost.

I arrive in Chicago on a gray Sunday morning, when the city’s still sleepy and the shops are all closed. I’ve come from the Greyhound station a few blocks away, and I’m stiff but restless after thirty hours on cramped buses that took me from the foothills of Salt Lake City, through the Rockies, and across the endless green flat that is Nebraska.

I hadn’t intended to take the bus. Two hours south of Salt Lake I’d received an email from Amtrak informing me that the tracks west of Chicago were out of service, submerged in places by flooding in one of the wetter springs we’ve seen in some time. So it goes.

Now, the bus is behind me, and I’ve a day to spend in the Windy City before boarding the Lake Shore Limited to New York. I dedicate the morning to stretching my legs and putting some use to my boots, replacing the red dust of southern Utah with the gray of the city. Down Adams street to the marina, up the shoreline to the Navy Pier, pause for photography; then back west through town.

You can tell an old city from a new one by its character, and, as with people, some of that character is apparent on its face. D.C.’s buildings are squat and grand in shades of gray, Paris is warm and weathered, New York full of stone and steel and glass in high businesslike lines. Chicago’s towers ascend in clean verticality, built in rectangles of gray and blue. Some, like the Tribune building, are capped with cathedral crowns. On a still day, the lake reflects their mirror from any vantage point away from shore.

I take in a museum, a ride on the El around the loop, and a thick deep-dish pizza that goes down easy after two sparse days in bus terminals and on the road. Then back to Union Station as the lights come on and the sun goes down to pick up my pack from its locker and board the train to New York.

Americans these days prefer to fly, and seem to have lost the feel for train travel. There are no picturesque platforms of the sort you might find in Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhoff or Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa station. Instead, poorly lit waiting rooms with plastic seats and linoleum and lines of tired travelers lugging suitcases and taped-shut bins. Station attendants usher through the elderly and families with small children first, and then the main part of the line trundles forward.

Tickets checked, I walk out onto the underground platform. The Lake Shore Limited splits in Albany, so the conductor directs us each to a car determined by our final location. I walk past lit sleeper cars and a dining car where passengers idly watch us pass over food and cups of coffee, then step onto the train. After Greyhound’s cramped seating, the ability to stretch out my legs is a luxury, and power outlets along the wall mean I can get some work done as the train lurches into motion and rolls out of its lair and through the lights of the city.

The seats being incomparably better for sleeping, it’s not long before I close my computer and turn off my seat light. I wake once during the night to see a massive factory rolling past, glittering lights reflected in a wide river.

I awake the next morning at a comfortably late hour as we’re pulling into Buffalo. Smokers pile out and nervously pull at cigarettes under the stern eye of the conductor, then stub them out half-smoked to hurry back on board as the train begins to move.

Out of Buffalo we pass the backyards of rural New York towns where old cars rust and piles of debris, covered by faded blue traps, press up against the sides of wooden sheds. Then out through woodlands and, gradually, into a swamp of stagnant water and moss-covered logs.

It’s here that the train pulls to a stop and doesn’t seem inclined to start again. I walk to the cafe car in time to hear one of the conductors say that, due to track construction, we’ll be waiting here for four westbound trains to pass us. I get a coffee and settle in. There’s a big articulate bald man with an impressive beard at one of the tables ahead of me, holding forth on the difficulties of maintaining an urban agricultural business. He’s a horticulturist, and is heading to New York to help a friend’s lagging enterprise get back on its feet. He’s none too happy about it.

“Basically,” he says, nodding to his audience across the aisle, “what I’ve become is a glorified babysitter for her business, and all I get out of it is a splitting headache and a place to live.” Given the cost of living in New York, a headache seems a small enough price to pay, but he’s quickly distracted from his troubles by a friend pointing out a “crocodilodon” made of logs rising out of the swamp outside. The crocodilon becomes the running joke for the rest of the time I’m in the car, and as I get up to leave the train finally begins to move again.

By the time we finally pull into Syracuse we’re two hours late and passengers are muttering about getting their money back. An Indian man trying to quit stares longingly at the smokers out on the platform says he can’t understand why a relatively pricey form of transportation is run so poorly here. “If air travel keeps getting more expensive,” I say, “maybe they’ll start trying harder with the trains.”

But after Syracuse things go more smoothly. The train-splitting stop in Albany takes less than ten minutes, and shortly afterwards we join the bank of the Hudson for the final few hours into New York City. The far bank alternates between little towns with sailboats and water towers, and big block factories in varying stages of decay. Some of the older ones, used in their youths to dumping waste directly into the river, look a little lost.

The sun drops close to the water, reflecting brilliant light into the compartments.. We pass progressively bigger towns and, once, an incongruous ruined castle on a river island. Forty-five minutes out of the city, we see first connections to New York’s network of local trains.

The final leg has us gliding past brick walls covered in graffiti and old tenement blocks, then plunging into the darkness of the Amtrak tunnels. Compared to the subways, these tunnels are cavernous, with little well-lit buildings standing in pools of light forty feet below a dark and pipe-laden ceiling.

The brakes screech on metal and we’re slowing down, passing lit advertisements on tile walls. We pull to a stop and collect our baggage as the doors hiss open, and I make my way out of Penn Station’s sprawling subterranean interior into the cool night air of the city. I’m here; my easternmost point in the United States before leaving the country for the next few years, and at the end of the first of what will be a very long succession of train journeys around the world.

About the Author

Tim Raveling is a writer and photographer currently making a three-year journey around the world without flying. You can follow along at Good and Lost or on Twitter.

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